Eighty-Six Muslim Victims of Prijedor Massacre Laid To Rest in Bosnia

A funeral was held on July 27 for 86 Muslim victims of a massacre in the northwestern city of Prijedor by Bosnian Serb forces in the early 1990s during the Bosnian war.

Hundreds assembled to pay their respect to the victims who were found in 2017 in a mass grave in a mountainous region of central Bosnia.

The victims were mostly male and many teenagers. They were part of a group of more than 200 mostly Bosnian Muslim civilians as well as several Catholic Croats who were held in a detention camp in the Prijedor region.

They were told they would be part of a prisoner exchange on August, 21, 1992.

They were executed instead after disembarking a bus and told to line up on the edge of a cliff.

So far, 181 victims of the massacre have been identified.

Serb forces killed about 3,200 people, including 250 women and 100 children, in the region after taking it over in April 1992.

At least 650 people are still missing.

In January 2018, prosecutors in Bosnia-Herzegovina said German had authorities arrested Milorad Obradovic, a former member of Bosnian Serb forces, on suspicion of committing war crimes.

Obradovic was accused of participating in the detention of some 120 Bosnian Muslim civilians near Prijedor in July 1992 before they were massacred.

Another suspect in the same case, Slobodan Knezevic, was arrested in Montenegro in December 2017.

Bosnia's 1992-95 war resulted in the death of an estimated 100,000 people and the displacement of some 2.6 million more.

As part of the 1995 Dayton accords that mostly ended the violence, Bosnia was broken into two constituent states: a Muslim-Croat federation and the Republika Srpska.

Based on reporting by AFP and RFE/RL’s Bosnian Service